January 03, 2018, 01:30 PM GMT+5:30

The Steve Jobs guide to manipulating people and getting what you want

Steve Jobs died five years ago today, at the age of 56.Jobs launched two of the most valuable and creative companies in modern times with Apple and Pixar – but he didn’t reach those heights by following the rules all the time.

Jobs faced many obstacles to get Apple and Pixar off the ground. But he had a unique way of crafting his own reality, a “distortion field” he’d use to persuade people that his personal beliefs were actually facts, which is how he pushed his companies forward.

He also used a blend of manipulative tactics to ensure his victories, particularly in boardroom meetings with some of the most powerful company executives in the world.

Many consider Jobs a genius, and everyone can learn a thing or two from his tactics.

Here, we teach you how to get what you want – whether that’s in your career, or in your life in general – by using examples from Jobs’ life. Most of these stories were taken from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, which you can buy here .

Pitch with passion. People can be influenced by strong displays of emotion.

Pitching was a key part of Jobs’ repertoire, and it should be part of yours, too. The process of selling — yourself, or a product — is the key to getting others to buy into your ideas.Before Apple launched iTunes in 2001, Jobs met with dozens of musicians in the hopes of corralling record labels into going along with the iTunes plan. One of the people Jobs pitched to was prominent trumpet player Wynton Marsalis.

Marsalis said Jobs talked for two hours straight.

“He was a man possessed,” he said. “After awhile, I started looking at him and not the computer, because I was so fascinated with his passion.”

He also pitched ideas to his ad team with a similar passion to “ensure that almost every ad they produced was infused with his emotion.” The resulting commercials, like the “1984” ad and the iPod silhouette ads, helped Apple become much more than just a computer company.

Being brutally honest will help you build a strong following.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple for his second stint in 1997, he immediately got to work trying to invigorate the company he started, which was suffering from too many products and too little direction. Jobs summoned Apple’s top employees to the auditorium, and, wearing shorts and sneakers, got up on stage and asked everyone to tell him “what’s wrong with this place.”After some murmurings and bland responses, Jobs cut everyone off. “It’s the products! So what’s wrong with the products?” Again, more murmurs. Jobs shouted, “The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!”

People would buy into Jobs’ ideas because he was always earnest about what he said. As he later told his biographer (emphasis ours): “I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of s–t and I can tell them the same… That’s the ante for being in the room: You’ve got to be able to be super honest.”

Work hard, and others will respect you. Respect is a crucial first step to getting what you want.

Steve Jobs had an incredible work ethic. Jobs told his biographer that when he returned to Apple in 1996, he worked from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day, since he was still also leading Pixar’s operations. He worked tirelessly, and suffered from kidney stones. But he insisted on motivating both companies by consistently showing up and pushing people to make the best products possible, and they respected him for it.

Disarm people with seduction and flattery.

Whether they’re working for you, or you’re working for them, people continually seek approval for their actions — so they respond very well to affection.And if you keep giving it to them, they’ll eventually crave it from you. From Isaacson’s biography (emphasis ours):

“Jobs could seduce and charm people at will, and he liked to do so. People such as (former Apple CEOs) Amelio and Sculley allowed themselves to believe that because Jobs was charming them, it meant that he liked and respected them. It was an impression that he sometimes fostered by dishing out insincere flattery to those hungry for it. But Jobs could be charming to people he hated just as easily as he could be insulting to people he liked.”

Claim all the good ideas are yours — and if you’re reversing your position, get behind the new idea with full force. Memories of the past can be easily manipulated.

Steve Jobs wasn’t right all the time, but he was a master at convincing people he was. So how did he do it? He stood firmly in one position, and if your position was actually better than his, he wouldn’t just acknowledge it: He’d adopt your position as his own, which would throw you off balance.Bud Tribble, a former Mac engineer, had this to say in Jobs’ biography (emphasis ours):

“Just because he tells you something that is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow. If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.”

An example: When Apple decided to open retail stores for its products, Jobs’ retail SVP Ron Johnson came up with the idea of a “Genius Bar,” which would be staffed “with the smartest Mac people.” At first, Jobs called the idea crazy. “You can’t call them geniuses. They’re geeks,” he said. “They don’t have the people skills to deliver on something called the genius bar.” The next day, Apple’s general counsel was told to trademark the name “Genius Bar.”

Make decisions quickly and definitively. You can (usually) always change things later.

When it came to making new products, Apple rarely considered studies, surveys, and research. It was also rare for a major decision to take several months; Jobs tended to get bored easily and was quick to go with his gut.In the case of the first iMacs, Jobs immediately decided Apple would release the new computers in a rainbow of candy colors.

Jony Ive, Apple’s chief of design, said “in most places that decision would have taken months. Steve did it in a half hour.”

On the same computer, iMac engineer Jon Rubinstein tried to argue that the iMac should come with a CD tray; but Jobs detested CD trays and he really wanted a high-end slot drive. On that particular decision, Jobs was wrong — burning music could only be accomplished on CD trays, and as that trend took off, the first round of iMacs were left behind. But since Jobs was able to make quick decisions, the first iMacs shipped on time, and the second-generation desktops included the CD drive that could rip and burn music, which was the necessary peg Apple needed to launch iTunes and the iPod.

Don’t wait to fix problems. Fix them now.

When Jobs was working with Pixar on “Toy Story,” which would be the first feature-length film created entirely with 3D animation, the first iteration of Woody the cowboy had gradually turned into a jerk, mainly through script edits handed down by Disney. But Jobs refused to let Disney, one of the biggest companies in the world, ruin Pixar’s original story.“If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” Jobs said. “That’s what other companies do.”

Jobs insisted that Disney give the reins back to Pixar, and in the end, Woody became a very likeable and thee-dimensional character (no pun intended) in “Toy Story,” which went on to be a monumental success.

Another example: When Jobs was designing the first Apple Store, his retail VP Ron Johnson woke up in the middle of a night before a big meeting with an excruciating thought: They had organized the stores completely wrong. Apple had previously organized the stores by the types of products being sold, but Johnson realized Apple needed to organize the store based around what people might want to do with those products.

Johnson told Jobs his epiphany the next morning, and after a brief eruption from Jobs, the Apple CEO told all who attended that day’s meeting that Johson was absolutely right, and they needed to redo the entire layout, which delayed the planned rollout by 3-4 months. “We’ve only got one chance to get it right,” Jobs said.

There are two ways to deal with problematic people: Either address them head on…

Jobs often saw the world through binary terms: “A person was either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or s–t.” He wanted Apple to be a company of “A players,” which meant regularly cutting B and C players, or pushing them with great fervor — bullying them, to some extent — to become A players.Before Apple launched the Macintosh, one of the engineers charged with building a mouse that could easily move the cursor in every direction — not just up/down and left/right — told Bill Atkinson, one of the early Apple employees who developed graphics for the Mac, that there was “no way to build such a mouse commercially.” After Jobs heard about the complaint over dinner, Atkinson arrived at work the next day only to discover Jobs had fired the engineer. The first words said by the engineer’s replacement were, “I can build the mouse.”

…Or “follow the line of least involvement” and ignore them entirely.

Jobs did not like overly complex issues, especially if they required him to make accommodations. So on occasion, he would become totally aloof. As Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson said, “Jobs would go silent and ignore situations that made him uncomfortable.”Jobs used this tactic, which was extremely effective, on several occasions: When Apple’s then-CEO Gil Amelio asked what role he wanted to play in the company after he rejoined via the NeXT acquisition — Jobs couldn’t say “I want your job,” after all — and when he wasn’t sure how to deal with his estranged daughter Lisa.

“There was a community of people who wanted to preserve his Woodside house due to its historical value, but Steve wanted to tear it down and build a home with an orchard. Steve let that house fall into so much disrepair and decay over a number of years that there was no way to save it. The strategy he used to get what he wanted was to simply follow the line of least involvement and resistance. So by his doing nothing on the house, and maybe even leaving the windows open for years, the house fell apart. Brilliant, no?”

Strike when the iron’s hot, and strike hard.

Success usually tricks people into thinking they can stop working; Jobs had a much different point of view. When his big bet on Pixar paid off, and the company’s first movie “Toy Story” was a huge success with critics and the box office, Jobs decided to take the company public.Investment bankers said it couldn’t happen, especially after Pixar had hemorrhaged money for five years prior. Even John Lasseter, Pixar’s creative head, told Jobs he should wait until after Pixar’s second film. But Jobs insisted.

“Steve overruled me and said we needed the cash so we could put up half the money for our films and renegotiate the Disney deal,” Lasseter told Jobs’ biographer.

And that’s exactly what happened. Pixar held its IPO one week after “Toy Story” opened in theaters, and it was a wild success: It exceeded Netscape as the biggest IPO of 1995, and more importantly, it meant Pixar no longer needed to be dependent on Disney to finance its movies. Suddenly, Disney, with its flailing animation department, needed Pixar, instead of the other way around. The Mickey Mouse company would later realize this fact, and pay $7.4 billion to acquire Pixar — effectively making Jobs the biggest shareholder of Disney, keeping Pixar independent, and also saving Disney’s once-great animation department in the process.

When you have leverage, USE IT.

It was huge news when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company he helped start but had since lost its “magic.” Jobs insisted he was only an “advisor” to Apple at the time, but those in and around Apple knew he was really in control. Apple’s then-CEO Gil Amelio depended on Jobs for the company’s vision moving forward.So, on his first Thursday back at Apple, Jobs used this newfound leverage to his advantage: He called a board meeting and demanded Apple reprice its stock options by lowering the exercise price to make them valuable again. It was legal at the time, but not considered good business, at least ethically. But even after the board of directors balked at the idea, saying a study would take at least two months, Jobs fired back.

“You brought me here to fix this thing, and people are the key… Guys, if you don’t want to do this, I’m not coming back on Monday. Because I’ve got thousands of key decisions to make that are far more difficult than this, and if you can’t throw your support behind this kind of decision, I will fail. So if you can’t do this, I’m out of here, and you can blame it on me, you can say, ‘Steve wasn’t up for the job.’”

The board gave Jobs what he wanted. But Jobs didn’t stop there: The next day, he demanded all the board members resign, “or else I’m going to resign and not come back on Monday.” He said all the board members had to go, except for Ed Woolard, and that’s exactly what happened. By being able to choose his own board members — and act independently from them — he had the power to control Apple’s next projects, which made it possible for gadgets like the iPod to exist.

Demand perfection, and don’t settle for anything less.

Jobs detested anyone who was ready to make compromises to get a product out on time and on budget. He found adequacy to be “morally appalling.” Jobs’ goal for Apple was never to simply beat competitors, or even to make money: it was to make the greatest product possible, “or even a little greater.”He was demanding about everything:

When the Macintosh booted up too slowly, he badgered the engineer responsible, equating the situation to a matter of life or death.

He worked with countless artists and advertising agencies to make sure Apple’s ads had the right feel, and that the imagery and the audio synced up perfectly.

Of the iPod engineers, he demanded the ability to access any function on the music player with three button presses, and no more.

He insisted the production process for all Apple computers be shaved down from four months to two.

Each one of these individual decisions could be considered nitpicks, but when put all together, Apple created a cult-like following unlike any other. Unlike other tech companies that had come and gone, customers and loyal fans felt like Apple put their interests first, and they were, as a result, willing to pay high prices for those products.

“Steve created the only lifestyle brand in the tech industry,” Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison told Jobs’ biographer. “There are cars people are proud to have — Porsche, Ferrari, Prius — because what I drive says something about me. People feel the same way about an Apple product.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Smith

Dave Smith is a deputy editor for Business Insider, running the tech section.

His work has been published in Newsweek, ABC News, USA TODAY, Forbes, ReadWrite, Inc. Magazine, The International Business Times, NPR, and others.

Disclosure: Smita Nair Jain doesn’t own stock in any publicly traded companies. She has equivalent of the American 401(k) plan in India that is automatically managed.

Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author(s), publisher(s) and forum participant(s) on this web site do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the @SmitaNairJain or official policies of the #SmitaNairJain

{{{Smita Nair Jain – Futurist Keynote Speaker}}} This is what I do for my clients: I make people think; I make people laugh; and I make people take action. I do this at company events, conferences, and business seminars, on a variety of topics. When I talk about thought leadership, people often ask me a few key questions. So, I thought I’d address them all right here. I work with executives, entrepreneurs, non-profit leaders and their teams who are taking the journey from leader to thought leader and/or creating a thought leadership culture. My favourite topics are agile management, organizational change, creative leadership, personal development, work-life integration, and systems thinking. My #Believe Credo – Here’s the credo I wake up to every day and keeps me energized: “Believe that what you’re doing is right.” – Follow your passion. Do it because you’re meant to do it. Do it to do it, not just to make money. “Believe that you can achieve it.” – Have the confidence to know that if you think you can achieve it, you can. “Believe that it will happen.” – Have the conviction to follow through. Trust that if you see only darkness around you, there is light at the end of the tunnel. #womenintech #womenindigital #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #successful #success #strategy #strategies #startups #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #smitanairjain #opportunity #mentor #lifestylebloggers #leadership #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #developers #creativeoffice #businesswoman #businessintelligence #business #blogging #bloggerstyle #bloggers #believe

Home of the brightest engineers, the coolest new technology, and the highest salaries in the world, Silicon Valley is also home of the most cutthroat competitive high schools.

Let’s take a look at the schools with the highest SAT scores in the nation. Unsurprisingly, 6 of the top 20 are located in Silicon Valley: Monta Vista (#15), Mission San Jose (#18), Lynbrook (#7), Gunn (#12), Leland (#20), and Harker (#2).

In many of these schools, getting a 3.5 GPA could put you in the bottom half of the class (especially at academic powerhouses Gunn, Monta Vista, and Harker).

In other schools, athletics play a bigger role in the culture, but success is still expected nonetheless (Bellarmine, Los Gatos, Mitty). Also, it’s a given that the student body is not only talented, but also well accomplished in many different areas.

For the No. 1 public university in the world, those are some crazy numbers. Not to be out-matched, Mission San Jose High boasted a 29% acceptance rate to Berkeley in 2015, with 93 admitted. I understand admission to Berkeley isn’t the best metric to judge competitiveness/success, but it shows a small part of the bigger picture.

Evergreen Valley, my home school, is considered one of the middle-tier competitive schools, but it’s slowly becoming a microcosm of the Palo Alto/Cupertino areas. It’s reflected in our college admissions.

This year alone, we have 32 students going to Berkeley and 4 going to Stanford. Now, it’s great and all that we’re succeeding in the college admissions game, but at what cost?

The bottom line is that behind these stellar numbers and phenomenal extracurricular activities lies a culture of overwork and incessant competition. There no longer exists a free summer for high school kids.

Everyone is competing — who can get the best internship? Who can pack their schedule the most? Who can get admitted to the best, most prestigious summer programs? Even in school, everyone is competing — who can work the hardest? Who can sleep the least and still get straight A’s? Who can do it all? Who can be a part of the most clubs?

Going through it, it always seemed like a giant race to nowhere. There are a few features that distinguish Silicon Valley high schools:

2. Stifling competition

We’re ambitious and we’re talented and we’re hardworking — no doubt about it. We start companies and publish books and become nationally ranked in every extracurricular activity possible while juggling a 4.0 GPA. But with all of it comes a price.

By most of society here, you are judged by your numbers. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard parents ask about my SAT score and where I’m going to college, and then change their perception of me because of it. I want to tell them that these superficial things don’t define me — that I’m more than these arbitrary numbers and test scores.

3. Ridiculous over-scheduling

You’ll see kids with schedules more packed than an exec in the corporate world. After school, go to sports practice for 2-3 hours. After sports practice, practice your instrument for 1-2 hours. Now, it’s time for dinner.

Eat for an hour, do homework for an hour, and then sleep at 9 p.m.? Not really. Not when you have five AP courses that each assign Herculean loads of homework. Not when you’re managing several clubs and organizations. Not when you’re also involved in student government.

Where’s the time to relax? Where’s the time to enjoy? We’re bogged down in this mindset that happiness is to be postponed.

It’s this mentality that says “I’ll work hard now, so that I can enjoy my life later. It’s OK if I don’t enjoy now because it’ll get better.” But when does it end? Caught in this vicious cycle, it’s hard to see what makes life worth it.

The only thing I want to say to the Silicon Valley teens out there is to enjoy your time. Be ambitious, be hardworking, be everything you’ve wanted to be and more — but don’t forget to stop and smell the flowers. After all, what’s life without enjoyment?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kalvin Lam is a member of Brown’s class of 2020. He enjoys sharing stories over food, running to new places, and solving interesting problems. He was born and raised in San Jose, California.

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{{{Smita Nair Jain – Futurist Keynote Speaker}}} This is what I do for my clients: I make people think; I make people laugh; and I make people take action. I do this at company events, conferences, and business seminars, on a variety of topics. When I talk about thought leadership, people often ask me a few key questions. So, I thought I’d address them all right here. I work with executives, entrepreneurs, non-profit leaders and their teams who are taking the journey from leader to thought leader and/or creating a thought leadership culture. My favourite topics are agile management, organizational change, creative leadership, personal development, work-life integration, and systems thinking. My #Believe Credo – Here’s the credo I wake up to every day and keeps me energized: “Believe that what you’re doing is right.” – Follow your passion. Do it because you’re meant to do it. Do it to do it, not just to make money. “Believe that you can achieve it.” – Have the confidence to know that if you think you can achieve it, you can. “Believe that it will happen.” – Have the conviction to follow through. Trust that if you see only darkness around you, there is light at the end of the tunnel. #womenintech #womenindigital #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #successful #success #strategy #strategies #startups #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #smitanairjain #opportunity #mentor #lifestylebloggers #leadership #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #developers #creativeoffice #businesswoman #businessintelligence #business #blogging #bloggerstyle #bloggers #believe

Deloitte’s tech predictions for 2018: More AI, digital subscriptions, AR, and live events

Accounting and tech consultant Deloitte released its predictions for the technology industry in 2018, covering topics from the growth of augmented reality to the triumph of live programming on the Internet.

“We have reached the tipping point where adoption of machine learning in the enterprise is poised to accelerate, and will drive improved business operations, better decision making and provide enhanced or entirely new products and services,” said Paul Sallomi, vice chairman of Deloitte, in a statement.

Here’s the nine major predictions and the explanations for them:

Deloitte predicts that more than a billion smartphone users will create augmented reality content at least once during 2018, with 300 million doing so monthly and tens of millions weekly.

Ad blocking will gain momentum. Three quarters of adults in North America engage in some form of ad blocking already, though only 10 percent engage in four or more types of ad blocking. Millennials (aged 18 to 24) are 70 percent more likely to have four or more forms of ad blocking than the average adult. Consumers who are young, highly educated, employed, and have higher incomes are more likely to be heavy ad blockers.

Live events are still king. U.S. TV viewers watch about 1.1 billion hours of live TV daily, and live broadcast and events will generate over $545 billion in direct revenues in 2018. Broadcast TV ads and subscriptions represent about $358 billion of that amount. Livestreaming will hit $7.4 billion in 2018, and China will remain the largest market for livestreaming at $4.4 billion in 2018, an 86 percent increase from 2016.

Revenue from esports will pass the $1 billion mark for the first time in 2018. In 2015, esports revenue was $325 million. Viewing hours leaped to an estimated 6 billion hours globally in 2016, five times the volume of 2010, but were only 19 percent higher year-on-year and still equivalent to only 5.33 days of live TV viewing in the US. China represents half of all viewing hours and generated 11.1 billion streams in 2016, significantly more than the 2.7 billion for North America.

People will open their wallets for digital transactions. By the end of 2018, 50 percent of adults in developed countries will have at least two online-only media subscriptions, and by the end of 2020, the average will have doubled to four. In 2020, there will be 680 million digital subscriptions.

The mobile phone market is saturated, with more than 90 percent of adults in developed countries having a phone. A fifth of North American homes will get all of their Internet data access via cellular mobile networks. At the same time, Deloitte predicts 45 percent of global adult smartphone users and 65 percent of millennials will worry that they are using their phones too much for certain activities and may try to limit their usage in 2018.

By 2023 more than 1.85 billion phones will be sold worldwide each year, or 5 million a day. That means if you stacked all the phones sold in a year end to end, they’d stretch more than halfway to the moon. And those smartphone owners will interact with their smartphones 65 times a day in 2023, up 20 percent from 2018.

TV viewing by millennials will continue to decline. The number will decline by 4 percent to 11 percent per year in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom in 2018 and 2019. This rate of decline has been steady for seven years and is now off by more than 40 percent of the rate from seven years ago. Forces that distracted young people away from traditional TV, such as smartphones, social media, and video piracy, are reaching saturation.

Enterprise machine learning pilots and deployments will double in 2018, powered by new chips and better software tools.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist for more than 28 years, and he has covered games for 21 years. He has been at VentureBeat since 2008. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, “Opening the Xbox” and “The Xbox 360 Uncloaked.” He organizes the annual GamesBeat and GamesBeat Summit conferences. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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TEDx Talksr | Break The Shackles To Climb The Ladder | Smita Nair Jain | TEDxIIMRaipur | “Women empowerment for me is the power and freedom to choose my own opportunities and enhancing my capabilities to do what I really want to do.” She is one of the new generation management gurus who throws new light on corporate behavior and particularly its global aspect. She is also one of the best keynote speakers of all times. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

SMITA NAIR JAIN :: THE POWER OF PARADIGMS (PAIR-A-DIMES) :: Change Your Thoughts & You Change Your Actions – {{{Smita Nair Jain – Futurist Keynote Speaker}}} This is what I do for my clients: I make people think; I make people laugh; and I make people take action. I do this at company events, conferences, and business seminars, on a variety of topics. When I talk about thought leadership, people often ask me a few key questions. So, I thought I’d address them all right here. I work with executives, entrepreneurs, non-profit leaders and their teams who are taking the journey from leader to thought leader and/or creating a thought leadership culture. My favourite topics are agile management, organizational change, creative leadership, personal development, work-life integration, and systems thinking. My #Believe Credo – Here’s the credo I wake up to every day and keeps me energized: “Believe that what you’re doing is right.” – Follow your passion. Do it because you’re meant to do it. Do it to do it, not just to make money. “Believe that you can achieve it.” – Have the confidence to know that if you think you can achieve it, you can. “Believe that it will happen.” – Have the conviction to follow through. Trust that if you see only darkness around you, there is light at the end of the tunnel. #womenintech #womenindigital #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #successful #success #strategy #strategies #startups #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #smitanairjain #opportunity #mentor #lifestylebloggers #leadership #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #developers #creativeoffice #businesswoman #businessintelligence #business #blogging #bloggerstyle #bloggers #believe

{{{Smita Nair Jain – Futurist Keynote Speaker}}} This is what I do for my clients: I make people think; I make people laugh; and I make people take action. I do this at company events, conferences, and business seminars, on a variety of topics. When I talk about thought leadership, people often ask me a few key questions. So, I thought I’d address them all right here. I work with executives, entrepreneurs, non-profit leaders and their teams who are taking the journey from leader to thought leader and/or creating a thought leadership culture. My favourite topics are agile management, organizational change, creative leadership, personal development, work-life integration, and systems thinking. My #Believe Credo – Here’s the credo I wake up to every day and keeps me energized: “Believe that what you’re doing is right.” – Follow your passion. Do it because you’re meant to do it. Do it to do it, not just to make money. “Believe that you can achieve it.” – Have the confidence to know that if you think you can achieve it, you can. “Believe that it will happen.” – Have the conviction to follow through. Trust that if you see only darkness around you, there is light at the end of the tunnel. #womenintech #womenindigital #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #successful #success #strategy #strategies #startups #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #smitanairjain #opportunity #mentor #lifestylebloggers #leadership #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #developers #creativeoffice #businesswoman #businessintelligence #business #blogging #bloggerstyle #bloggers #believe

Annie Dillard on Writing“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you.”

Susan Sontag on Writing“There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.”

David Foster Wallace: Writing, Death, and Redemption“You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness … has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.”

H. P. Lovecraft: Advice to Aspiring Writers (1920)“A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe’s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.”

Samuel Johnson on Writing and Creative Doggedness“Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.”

Willa Cather: Writing Through Troubled Times“The test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.”

Umberto Eco’s Advice to Writers“If we think that our reader is an idiot, we should not use rhetorical figures, but if we use them and feel the need to explain them, we are essentially calling the reader an idiot. In turn, he will…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Popova (Bulgarian: Мария Попова; born 28 July 1984) is a Bulgarian-born writer, blogger, literary and cultural critic living in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for her speeches, and most importantly her blog BrainPickings.org, which features her writing on culture, books, philosophy and eclectic subjects on and off the Internet.

Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author(s), publisher(s) and forum participant(s) on this web site do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the @SmitaNairJain or official policies of the #SmitaNairJain

TEDx Talksr | Break The Shackles To Climb The Ladder | Smita Nair Jain | TEDxIIMRaipur | “Women empowerment for me is the power and freedom to choose my own opportunities and enhancing my capabilities to do what I really want to do.” She is one of the new generation management gurus who throws new light on corporate behavior and particularly its global aspect. She is also one of the best keynote speakers of all times. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Inside the world of Silicon Valley’s ‘coasters’ – the millionaire engineers who get paid gobs of money and barely work

The least-secret secret in the Valley is called “resters and vesters,” or “coasters” – which refers to engineers who get paid big bucks without doing too much work, waiting for their stock to vest.

We talked to engineers in the “rest and vest” world who explained how it happens and how they spend their days.

As cushy as it sounds, there are some real career risks and pitfalls for doing this rest-and-vest thing.

On a sunny summer morning, a Facebook engineer woke up to go to work but felt ill. She ran to her bathroom and threw-up. “I thought I was getting sick,” the engineer recalled.

It wasn’t a virus or food poisoning. She was having a bad reaction to her job.

She was making $1 million a year, mostly in stock, and running a team of about three dozen people, she told Business Insider. And she had worked herself into a state of exhaustion in the three years since Facebook had acquired her previous company. The acquisition had been highly political, the integration wasn’t going well and she had been killing herself to make it more successful and protect her people from losing their jobs over it.

As tired as she was, she couldn’t just quit this job. She owed a big chunk of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those taxes.

But after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work, she decided not to go in. Not that day. Not ever again. And she knew she wouldn’t get fired.

But after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work, she decided not to go in. Not that day. Not ever again. And she knew she wouldn’t get fired.

Because not going to work was actually her manager’s idea.

The previous day she had told him she would be leaving the company at the end of the year, six months away. She wanted to spend the rest of the year wrapping up her projects but not taking on any more, collecting on the stock that would vest by year end and making the money she needed to pay her taxes.

“My manager and I had lots of conversations. I teetered on leaving so many times,” she said. “But this time was for real. I was going to see these projects to a healthy state and then I needed to go. I felt good about it. The next thing, he told me not to come in.”

She panicked thinking he was firing her but he explained she wasn’t being terminated at all. “Just don’t come to work. You’re burned out and need a break. Just don’t talk about it and everyone will assume you’re on someone else’s team,” her told her.

The manager’s proposal didn’t go over well. “I was livid and I never would have done it. I had every intention of joining another team. But then I woke up and started vomiting,” she said.And that’s how this hard-working, conscientious engineer wound up joining the least-secret, secret club in the Valley, known as “rest and vest.”

The least-secret, secret club in Silicon Valley

“Resting and vesting” is when an employee, typically an engineer, has an easy work load (if any job responsibilities at all) and hangs out on the company’s payroll collecting full pay and stock. Stock is often the bigger chunk of total compensation for a senior engineer than salary.Once she was in rest-and-vest mode, this engineer spent her time attending tech conferences, working on pet coding projects and networking with friends, quietly developing an idea for her next gig, a startup.

She realized that her manager let her “rest and vest” to keep her quiet about the problems with that acquisition, so she had time to find her next thing. Had he terminated her immediately, she would have been incensed. “Everyone knew I had a big mouth and would speak out. He figured, ‘Hey, it costs us next to nothing keep her happy for six months,’” she said.

Business Insider talked to about a half a dozen people with direct knowledge of the rest-and-vest culture. Some were “fat cats” themselves. Some were hiring managers who tried to lure these folks back to the world of productivity. Many acknowledged that resting and vesting was a common, hush-hush practice at their own companies. Internally, these people are often referred to as “coasters.”

‘My days began at 11 … and I took long lunches’

Engineers can wind up in “rest and vest” jobs in a variety of ways.

Manny Medina, the CEO of fast-growing Seattle startup Outreach , has been on all sides of it. He briefly was a coaster himself, and says he saw how Microsoft used it to great effect when he worked for the software giant. He has also tried to lure some “rest and vest” engineers to come work for him at his startup.

Medina said he experienced the high-pay, no-work situation early in his career when he was a software engineer in grad school. He finished his project months early, and warned his company he would be leaving after graduation.They kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but didn’t want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being available to answer questions, he recalls.

“My days began at that point at 11 and I took long lunches,” he laughs. “They didn’t want you to build anything else, because anything you built would be maintained by someone else. But you have to stand by while they bring people up to speed.”

Years later, he landed at Microsoft and says he saw how Microsoft used high-paying jobs strategically, both within its engineering ranks and with its R&D unit, Microsoft Research. The company, he says, would nab hard-to-find experts in up-and-coming fields like artificial intelligence, robotics, natural speech language, quantum computing and so on, often allowing them to collect their Microsoft pay while maintaining a job as a professor or researcher at a university.

“You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it and that’s very valuable,” he said. “It’s a defensive measure.”

‘Mid-30’s pulling in 7-figures a year’

AP

At other companies it’s less about defense and more about becoming indispensable.

For instance, Facebook has a fairly hush bonus program called “discretionary equity” or “DE,” said a former Facebook engineer who received it.”DE” is when the company hands an engineer a massive, extra chunk of restricted stock units, worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s a thank you for a job well done. It also helps keep the person from jumping ship because DE vests over time. These are bonus grants that are signed by top execs, sometimes even CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself.

“At Facebook the ‘OGs’ [Original Gangsters] we know got DE,” this former Facebook engineer said. OGs refer to engineers who worked at the company before the IPO. “Their Facebook stock quadruples and they don’t leave. They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start to pull 9-5 days,” this person said.

Facebook declined to comment but several engineers told us that Facebook has a reputation of requiring long hours from their engineers.

These DE bonuses are not specifically designed as a mechanism for resting and vesting, but they can play a role in enabling it. Those with DE packages land in a self-fulfilling prophecy of success. They become known to top managers. They get choice assignments with plenty of resources which means they can work less with good outcomes, this Facebook engineer described.

“These are really smart people and they don’t leave. They’re in their mid-30s, pulling in seven figures a year, and they don’t have to work as hard. We say they’re just coasting,” he said.

The 10x engineer

Other “rest-and-vest” types are part of a tribe in the Valley known as “the 10x engineer, ” a term used to describe someone said to be 10-times more effective than a so-called ordinary engineer.

Legend has it that a 10x engineer can do in one hour what it would take others 10 hours to do. Some of these folks are just plain brilliant. Others aren’t necessarily smarter but they know every detail of a critical system.

“When people have been there long enough, they often bring a value that’s not easy to see. They might know where the bodies are buried on some project, be called in as a last resort to debug a project, or they are known as a great pinch hitter,” describes the former rest-and-vest Facebook engineer.

“One guy at Facebook didn’t seem to work a lot, but when the site would go down he could find things that couldn’t be found,” the engineer described.

Google and the “rest and vest” joke

BI Graphics/Anaele Pelisson

Other members of the “rest and vest” set are the “coasters,” the long-timers who have reached a company’s top engineering ranks and don’t need to work hard to stay there.They may not be 10x engineers, but they are institutional employees who know how to do just the right amount of work to get a good annual review and collect their next batch of stock grants.

According to all the folks we talked to, Google is known as a place where this type of rester-and-vester flourishes.

“Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior engineers and don’t work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs,” one engineer described.

A former Google manager who recently left the company agreed. “There are a lot ‘coasters’ who reached a certain level and don’t want to work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won’t work to get promoted, don’t want to get promoted. If their department doesn’t like them, after a year or two they move somewhere else,” she said.

The term “rest and vest” even became a term jokingly associated with Google when HBO’s satire sitcom, “Silicon Valley” did a bit on it. In the hit show, Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti, played by actor Josh Brener, got a promotion at the fictional tech giant Hooli, which is inspired by Google. Bighetti was not assigned to any project and instead joined a group of other unassigned employees squandering their days on the company’s roof.”I’ve actually had a number of people, including today at Google X, … send me pictures of themselves on a roof, kicking back doing nothing, with the hashtag ‘unassigned’ or ‘rest and vest.’ It’s something that really happens, and apparently, somewhat often,” the actor Brener told Business Insider’s Melia Robinson last year.

While those pictures were likely jokes sent to Brener by fans of the show, several people from Google told us that when very senior engineers wrap up a big project, they may find themselves unassigned for a while, reporting to Google cofounder Larry Page, until they decide what they want to do next, not unlike the Hooli roof-top crowd.

” Life is good, you maximize your vacation. I’ll come in when I want to”

Getty/Stephen Brashear

The moonshot research unit known as X, run by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has a Valley-wide reputation as a place to land a “rest and vest” gig, several people told us.An engineer currently working at X said that X’s extremely long-term view, and its tendency to cancel projects, has given it that reputation.

“At X, we don’t have a sense of budgetary concerns,” this person said. “Engineers get paid $250,00 to $600,000 range, but there’s no sense of urgency. It’s like a startup but not really. It’s like a startup with unlimited funds.”

Alphabet’s CFO and Wall Street veteran Ruth Porat is said to be reining in the idea of unlimited funds at X and elsewhere in the company.

People inside Google say that her office personally approves all new hires these days for all units except cloud computing, which reports to Diane Greene. (We hear cloud is growing so fast that Google is ramping investment in it, hiring like crazy.)

Even so, it’s the nature of X that can tempt people into coasting, this engineer says.

While other tech companies “sear” a product’s ship date into their engineers, who work nights and weekends to hit that date, “at X, people think, ‘if my project is cancelled, oh well, I’ll just find another project,’” he said.”You get paid so much after a certain level at Google, that once you get there, there’s no real reason to work that hard. Life is good, you maximize your vacation. I’ll come in when I want to,” the X engineer said, estimating that very senior engineering positions can command up to $400,000- $600,000 in total compensation at X, including bonus and stock options.

“What incentive do you have to work harder when you are already making $500,000 in salary and there is no more upward trajectory?” this person explains.

Google declined comment but a spokesperson for Alphabet X wholly rejected this characterization.

“W e have a compensation program here that has been tailored to encourage intellectual honesty from our teams,” X spokesperson Courtney Hohne told us. “So we developed this program to reduce any incentives to just hang around until some far-off payday.”

Come to work each day and play

REUTERS/Erin SiegalAn employee plays with Legos at the New York City offices of Google

Whether coasting long term, unassigned short-term or resting-and-vesting for another reason, these engineers typically do go into the office every day and are expected to show up, a former Google manager told Business Insider.”You have to be physically present,” this person said. But “there are so many distractions within Google” that it’s easy to come to work and still spend hours playing.

“You want to have lunch at a lovely cafe, or maybe attend a tech talk, or a class, or you want to go to a bodywork class at 6 p.m. or to get juice at the Slice Cafe and it’s on another campus. So you end up working 6 hours. There are times you have to put in nights and weekends, but in general, the company is so big and has so much money, you can work less,” this person told us.

From cushy to dead-end

AP Photo/Jeff ChiuCompanies say extraordinary campuses are a necessity, to recruit and retain top talent, and to spark innovation and creativity in the workplace. And there are business benefits and financial results for companies that keep their workers happy.

If this sounds like a dream job situation, there is a dark side: the “rest and vest” life can also be a career killer.In an industry that worships workaholics and the Next Big Thing, ambitious engineers want their resumes to be full of products used by millions of people.

“They know staying at X can be a career deadpool,” the X employee said.

X spokesperson Courtney Hohne says that this criticism misses the point of X.

” X is not about polishing products or optimizing systems that support millions of users,” Hohne said. “X is designed to be a place for early stage prototyping and de-risking. Different engineers (and business people) like different stages of the innovation process, and that’s ok.”

Still, Medina, the former coaster and Outreach CEO, agrees that doing the rest-and-vest thing too long can be dangerous for a career.

“These engineers are highly, highly paid, but there is no other company that will take them,” he says.

If the engineers are willing to adjust their pay expectations downward and roll up their sleeves again, startups like his have been known to offer them jobs.

“Eventually, they get tired and want to go get real work,” he said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julie Bort

I’m Business Insider’s chief tech reporter.

When I’m not writing for Business Insider, I can usually be found on the trails, on my mountain bike, or on my skis, if you know where to look.

Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author(s), publisher(s) and forum participant(s) on this web site do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the @SmitaNairJain or official policies of the #SmitaNairJain

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TEDx Talksr | Break The Shackles To Climb The Ladder | Smita Nair Jain | TEDxIIMRaipur | “Women empowerment for me is the power and freedom to choose my own opportunities and enhancing my capabilities to do what I really want to do.” She is one of the new generation management gurus who throws new light on corporate behavior and particularly its global aspect. She is also one of the best keynote speakers of all times. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

{{{Smita Nair Jain – Futurist Keynote Speaker}}} This is what I do for my clients: I make people think; I make people laugh; and I make people take action. I do this at company events, conferences, and business seminars, on a variety of topics. When I talk about thought leadership, people often ask me a few key questions. So, I thought I’d address them all right here. I work with executives, entrepreneurs, non-profit leaders and their teams who are taking the journey from leader to thought leader and/or creating a thought leadership culture. My favourite topics are agile management, organizational change, creative leadership, personal development, work-life integration, and systems thinking. My #Believe Credo – Here’s the credo I wake up to every day and keeps me energized: “Believe that what you’re doing is right.” – Follow your passion. Do it because you’re meant to do it. Do it to do it, not just to make money. “Believe that you can achieve it.” – Have the confidence to know that if you think you can achieve it, you can. “Believe that it will happen.” – Have the conviction to follow through. Trust that if you see only darkness around you, there is light at the end of the tunnel. #womenintech #womenindigital #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #successful #success #strategy #strategies #startups #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #smitanairjain #opportunity #mentor #lifestylebloggers #leadership #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #developers #creativeoffice #businesswoman #businessintelligence #business #blogging #bloggerstyle #bloggers #believe

Blockstack raises $52 million to build a parallel internet where you own all your data

Blockchain startup Blockstack says it raised $52.8 million in its ICO, finalized Friday. The company is building a sort of parallel to the internet that users access via the Blockstack browser and that features a wide variety of apps. The Blockstack ecosystem promises to benefit both users and app makers. It gives users control over their own data via a personal API. Meanwhile, it allows developers to launch apps without having to host user data or worry about related storage costs and data privacy.

Instead of having all your data stored centrally (for example, having your email stored by Google, your photos by Instagram, your social messaging stored by Facebook), you would have your data stored locally on your laptop, with copies in one or more cloud services of your own choosing. Blockstack apps would have pointers to the part of your data relevant to their app, but they wouldn’t own or store that data. “It’s like Facebook Connect – you bring your identity with you” to various apps, Blockstack cofounder Ryan Shea told VentureBeat.

One potential limitation Blockstack’s approach faces is that, with all apps running locally on a user’s machine rather than on remote servers, app performance could be uneven, with the user experience depending on the limits of his or her device.

But Shea argues that users are unlikely to exprience hits in performance: “The apps run on your machine and they’re fairly lightweight, so in general you shouldn’t be constrained by any resources on your device. Some of these apps will require additional resources from remote servers, but in these cases they won’t be dependent on these remote servers. Instead, they will use them as throwaway servers that provide partial resources for a decentralized network.”

Performance questions aside, the Blockstack approach means users can control the level of security for their data and who it gets shared with. And developers can build and deploy apps without worrying about scalability and any legal obligations they have to protect user data. You can imagine an approach like this helping to solve the issue of GDPR compliance over the long term. (Europe’s GDPR ruling, which goes into effect in 2018, will put a heavy burden on foreign companies handling the data on individuals in the European Union).

Developers don’t need to learn a blockchain-specific language to code apps for the Blockstack ecosystem. “The average developer can build on this,” company cofounder Muneeb Ali told VentureBeat.

Blockstack is already live, though limited. You can see a demo below.

https://www.useloom.com/embed/642a8153b29f416b97ef3837c79b6f84There are currently about eight applications available to anyone who runs the browser (at least on a Mac; Windows and Linux are not yet fully supported). Over 10 more apps listed in the browser are under development. And thanks to the company’s three-month old “Signature Fund” – a $25 million fund pooled together by a group of VC firms backing Blockstack – a number of app makers are now getting funding to build for the platform.

Shea and Ali say the developer community behind the platform is large and growing. They cite some 13,000 developers worldwide who attend Blockstack meetups and say that members of the developer community have been putting up bounties to incentivize their peers to deliver new features. The bounties started small, the cofounders say, at about $5,000, but Blockstack’s investors have now gotten into the game, too, offering bounties of up to $25,000 for apps they’d like to see on the platform. Shea and Ali say they hope to see decentralized clones of services like Slack, Twitter, and GitHub running on Blockstack in the future.

The New York City-based company launched in 2013 and currently has an 11-person team. It expects to expand that number to more than 20 with its ICO funds, Shea said. Blockstack currently runs on the Bitcoin blockchain but is designed to run on any chain.

Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author(s), publisher(s) and forum participant(s) on this web site do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the @SmitaNairJain or official policies of the #SmitaNairJain

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TEDx Talksr | Break The Shackles To Climb The Ladder | Smita Nair Jain | TEDxIIMRaipur | “Women empowerment for me is the power and freedom to choose my own opportunities and enhancing my capabilities to do what I really want to do.” She is one of the new generation management gurus who throws new light on corporate behavior and particularly its global aspect. She is also one of the best keynote speakers of all times. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

So far, the FCC has refused to cooperate with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s investigation into identity theft during the commenting period on net neutrality repeal. So Schneiderman is using the internet to find the evidence and he needs help.

On November 21st, Schneiderman wrote an open letter to the FCC that claimed the process for considering public comments while it deliberated the repeal of net neutrality protections under Title II of the Communications Act was “corrupted by the fraudulent use of Americans’ identities.” The FCC is required by law to review public comments for a certain period of time before it votes. Studies have found that the majority of Americans support Title II protections. Still, there were tons of comments—many of them using the same language—that supported the repeal. Data scientist Jeff Kao recently released a study that found 1.3 million of the comments were likely fake. And numerous people have come forward to say their name was used without their knowledge.

Schneiderman is focused on the state of New York and he says that his office found tens of thousands of New Yorkers whose names may have been fraudulently used. He also acknowledges that its a major problem in other states. Still, the FCC won’t work with him to enforce the law. So, the AG’s office has built a tool to help gather that info through good old-fashioned crowdsourcing.

The FCC’s website isn’t particularly user-friendly. Back in May, John Oliver famously registered “GoFCCYourself.com” to help people navigate to the agency’s public comment page. When it comes to finding for those comments now, getting to the FCC’s search page isn’t intuitive. Once you do track it down, there are more than a dozen search fields. Schneiderman’s page has one search field for your name, and a button to click to report that your name has been used fraudulently. You don’t have to be from New York for this to be useful. The search results show all states. If you’re a victim, find your state attorney general on this list, and let them know.

The net neutrality repeal is coming on December 14th. Might as well use this page before your ISP throttles the hell out of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the various author(s), publisher(s) and forum participant(s) on this web site do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the @SmitaNairJain or official policies of the #SmitaNairJain

Last year, Richard Laermer decided to let his employees work from home on a regular basis. “We hire adults, they shouldn’t be tied to the office five days a week,” said Laermer, who owns a New York-based public relations firm. “I always assumed that you can get your work done anywhere, as long as you actually get it done.”

Turns out, he was wrong.

Employees took advantage of the perk, Laermer said. One was unavailable for hours at a time. Another wouldn’t communicate with co-workers all day, which Laermer found suspicious. The last straw, he said, was when someone refused to come in for a meeting because she had plans to go to the Hamptons. “That was the most unbelievably nervy thing I’d heard in years,” he said.

Ten months in, he scrapped the benefit and now requires all of his employees to come into the office every day.

While telecommuting, the umbrella term for any work occurring outside the traditional office, has ballooned over the last 20 years, some offices are rethinking overly broad policies. Flexible work remains popular at many organizations, but most companies want workers at work at least some—if not most—of the time. More than 60 percent of organizations surveyed by the Society of Human Resource Management this year said they allow some type of telecommuting, up from 20 percent in 1996. But telecommuting comes in many flavors, and 77 percent of organizations don’t let people work from home on a full-time basis. Most employers allow ad-hoc remote work for the person who needs to stay home for the plumber or wait for a package.

Technology such as chat programs and collaboration software made remote work feasible for many white collar workers in the last couple of decades. Employees love flexibility, often rating it high on benefits surveys. Parents in particular say it’s “extremely important,” a 2013 Pew survey found. Researchers have argued that unconventional work hours could even help close the pay gap.

In a bid to attract and retain employees—and cut down on real estate costs—companies permitted more remote work, and employees took advantage.

At the same time, work has also become more team-based. Only 38 percent of companies are “functionally” organized today with workers grouped together by job type, a 2016 Deloitte survey found. Most comprise collaborative groups that shift depending on the work. Deloitte found that one California organization was made up of over 30,000 constantly shifting teams. “I think that’s why we’re seeing remote work come back in,” said Erica Volini, a U.S. Human Capital Leader at Deloitte. “In order to work in teams, you need a higher level of collaboration.”

Some organizations found the most lenient work-from-home policies kept workers too isolated for that kind of work. These companies “took it to the extreme on virtual work,” added Volini.

International Business Machines Corp. is one such company. Earlier this year the tech giant told 2,000 U.S. workers they could no longer work from home and about the same number of employees that they had to commute into offices more often. Facing 20 consecutive quarters of falling revenue, IBM hopes that bringing people back together will lead to faster, more productive, and more creative workers. (A 2012 report from IBM found (PDF) that companies with flexible work policies reported improvements in productivity and cost savings.)

“IBM’s strategy is about adopting the best work method for the work being done,” said an IBM spokesperson. “For example, small, multi-disciplinary teams of engineers, coders, project managers and designers work in close proximity, often directly with clients or end-users, continually generating and refining ideas.”

One of the challenges with ending remote work is keeping employees happy. “It’s going to require organizations to think about how to still provide flexibility for their workforce,” said Deloitte’s Volini. Companies removing the perk risk employee backlash and attrition. IBM, for instance, has been careful not to eliminate all flexible work arrangements. The company still offers ad-hoc work-from-home arrangements to accommodate appointments and child-care needs.

Having everyone in the office has had “quite a positive impact” on business, said Laermer. Meetings are more productive, and employee morale has improved, he said. Laermer claims that employees “didn’t mind” losing their freedom. “Youngish people need structure,” he said, adding that they have small apartments and might not have a good place to work, anyway. He still offers flex time and lets workers leave at 3:00 p.m. on Fridays.

“I think people have to be trusted,” Laermer said. “But the working-from-home thing has to be on a per-person basis, and it can’t be very often. It just doesn’t work.”

(Corrects the number of IBM employees affected by the policy change in the tenth paragraph.)

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Virgin Hyperloop One is eyeing the possibility of building networks of high-speed tube transportation in India. The company, which recently rebranded to include “Virgin” in its name after Richard Branson’s investment, has started conducting studies with three Indian states to determine potential routes. Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh are looking to offer hyperloops as part of their public transit system in …….

Former Yahoo and Equifax bosses stumbled through a Wednesday hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee without answering basic questions about their respective massive data breaches, much to the chagrin of questioning lawmakers.

She also wasn’t able to say who was to blame for the attack, or why it took three years to learn of the breach.

What makes the Yahoo affair more confusing is that months before the disclosure, the company admitted it had been hacked in an entirely separate breach from 2014, in which 500 million user accounts were stolen.

Mayer recast blame on Russian hackers for the 2014 breach. Justice Department prosecutors filed charges against four Russians, including two intelligence officials and two other hackers.

But while Mayer lacked answers, she countered with contrition.

“As CEO, these thefts occurred during my tenure,” said Mayer, during her opening remarks. “I want to sincerely apologize to each and every one of our users.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) was less than forgiving, who said that it was “unfathomable” Mayer walked away with a payout that amounts to a what “small city” uses for its annual operating budget.

The company lost control of social security numbers, birth dates, home addresses, and in some cases, driving license information, as well as hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers and other personally identifiable information.

But chief among the complaints was that the company failed to fix a flaw that gave the hackers access to the company’s systems in the first place.

The company said in September that it knew that hackers exploited a vulnerability in its website, citing a known vulnerability in Apache Struts, a popular web server software. The bug had been patched earlier in March, but Smith said the patches hadn’t been installed on its servers.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) said that experts he spoke to said the breach was “not a sophisticated attack,” and criticized the company for the oversight.

“I can’t think of a clear definition of gross negligence,” said Peters. “You don’t take the precautions when a [vulnerability] roadmap has been put out?”

Equifax’s interim chief executive Paulino Barros said that the company now spends four-times as much on cybersecurity than it did prior to the breach.

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